(Insert scene of
lowland gorilla escaping cage while new keeper’s back is turned.)

And when mistakes
are made you get body slammed by a lowland Gorilla.

That commercial
might have been filmed, for real, 59 years ago on this date, April 15, in the
middle of the Chicago Loop.Here’s what
happened, according to The Tribune.

A monkey (okay, so
it wasn’t a lowland gorilla), one of six being shipped from Tappan, New York to
the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, got loose after a La Salle Street Station
attendant (when he has a lot to learn he makes mistakes) opened the cage door
for a clean-up.Leaving his five simian companions
huddled in the back of the cage (the monkey, not the attendant), “the
adventurous one dashed out and leaped east across the tracks, followed by six
Railway Express employees, a porter, and a fireman.”

Here it might be
fun to insert a clip of some random madcap scene from It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad
World).In fact, I will . . .

The little guy
began to monkey around on La Salle Street (sorry).At that point pedestrians joined in the
chase, which ended at 536 South La Salle at which point the monkey climbed a
pipe on the exterior of the building to the fire escape and took that route up
to the roof.

By the time the
elevator carried the agents, the porter, the fireman and all of the individuals
picked up along the way to the roof, the little guy was gone.Vanished.The chimp was off the old block.

The building
engineer at the ten-story government office building, Marvin Johnson, said,
“Everybody in the building thinks they have seen the monkey.They have got him p to the size of Bushman
now.”

No details on
whether the monkey was ever recovered although I would imagine that officials
at the Federal Reserve on the corner of Jackson and La Salle hardly reassured
the public when they reported that there was no monkey in the bank.